


we'll get together and have dinner

by Granspn



Series: slide on the ice [4]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: :), but also it's a little morbid at times? discussion of various character deaths, however many thousand words of bj and hawkeye being married, this the natural follow up to the wedding fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:22:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26726620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Granspn/pseuds/Granspn
Summary: bj, hawk, and erin go back east to visit Hawkeye’s dad every year until he dies, and hawk reckons with it, and there’s lots of cooking and a party and flashbacks and domesticity‘“Hawkeye, he was your father. As much as I don’t want you to be spiraling, I also don’t want you to just shove everything down that you’re feeling. You’ve got to know by now that that doesn’t help.”But Margaret also knows he’s partly right. He’s grieving, but he’s not taking his father’s death as a personal affront against goodness and justice the way he did the deaths of all the boys he couldn’t save. She also knows she’s going to talk to BJ to make a plan to help Hawkeye get some closure. Sometimes one goodbye just isn’t enough.’
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Series: slide on the ice [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1874662
Comments: 7
Kudos: 39





	we'll get together and have dinner

**Author's Note:**

> a) alternate title: elaborate breakfasts as a harbinger of doom
> 
> b) I really think my writing style could be summarized as, like, a surfeit of commas,,,
> 
> c) Can be read as a standalone, i think. lots of references to stuff from the other parts but nothing that should make it unintelligible or whatever i mean I don’t make the rules so you tell me

Sometimes Hawkeye thinks he has everything backwards. His dad calls him ‘Ben’ when he’s being casual and ‘Hawkeye’ when things are serious.

“I love you, Hawkeye. You did good,” are the last words he says to him, and he goes peacefully in his sleep, and it’s the best anyone could have hoped for, but it’s still crazy. They had thirty good years Before Korea and twenty good years After, but it’s never enough.

“It’s never enough,” Erin tells him as she hugs him in the hospital, Erin who’s having twenty good years and counting with her own father After but who had no good years Before and who has no concept of During. (Hawkeye barely has a concept of During. He knows BJ was there, that’s good enough.) They'd told Erin she should stay home with Peg and Margaret.

“Are you stupid?” she’d said, blocking them in the doorway. “He’s my grandfather and I’m coming.”

She only ever called him ‘Daniel’ or sometimes ‘Dr. Pierce’ just to be funny and she only ever calls him ‘Hawkeye’ but she’s right when she says he’s her grandfather so she goes with them. Hawkeye can’t believe he almost denied someone their chance for a goodbye. He chalks it up to the whole dad-dying thing. ( _Half the family dying, other half pregnant_ , he half thinks as they take a detour through Portland to see his cousin Emily, her kids, and her new grandchild.) And the times, they are a-changing, he thinks, as Emily almost doesn’t cringe greeting BJ. Aunt Eloise was five years younger than Daniel, and Emily is five years younger than Hawkeye, and her oldest, Christine, a slight girl with jet black hair and hazel eyes, is two years younger than Erin and just had a kid.

Emily holds the baby out to Hawkeye and coos, “Look, Richard, this is your Uncle Benjamin.” Behind him he can hear Erin stifling a laugh. Eloise didn’t believe in nicknames; she refused even to call him ‘Ben,’ and thus ‘Hawkeye’ was completely out of the question.

“Hey, Richie,” Hawkeye tickles the baby’s chin. “This is your Uncle Hawkeye,” he muses quietly.

“And your Aunt BJ,” BJ says over his shoulder.

“C’mon!” Erin whines.

“And your Auntie Erin,” Hawkeye says, as Erin leans over to look at him.

“He’s lovely, Emily,” Erin says diplomatically. “He’s a beautiful baby.”

“I certainly thought so,” Emily says, taking him back. Her upper lip is stiffer than Hawkeye’s, and her hair is turning white where his is still silver, but she isn’t completely bereft of the Pierce wit.

In the cab to the airport they mostly sit quietly, except for when Erin says, “I’m really gonna miss Daniel.”

BJ had been right about one thing; they did have dinner, back east, once a year. Of course, it wasn’t when he and Peg and Erin went to go see Hawkeye; it was when he and Hawkeye and Erin went to go see Hawkeye’s dad. The first time BJ had spoken to the elder Dr. Pierce, he’d thought the younger Dr. Pierce was dead. BJ heard him say two words before the line cut out. The next time he heard from him, or about him, rather, was in everyone’s letters about the party, in New York. Hawkeye read his letter aloud in the Swamp after O.R.

“ _Dear Ben,_

 _That BJ of yours is quite a character._ ” BJ blanched at being referred to as “that BJ of yours,” but Hawkeye couldn’t see in the dark of the tent. He continued.

“ _The last time I was in New York, your mother was taking me to see the Marx Brothers on Broadway, and this was twice the circus that ever was. As I’m sure gossip, alien, and sedition are flying around plenty as is, I’ll just say a thing or three and be on my way._

 _1.Alvin Houlihan does not like me._ ” BJ couldn’t contain a barked laugh.

“What a shock!” he said. Hawkeye grinned.

“I read on, _‘He specifically asked that I leave him out of any future correspondence because he found me so obnoxious and my humor so distasteful. Before you hear it from anyone else, I simply told him it_ _was_ _necessary for me to constantly put the knock on the army, since they were constantly trying to put the knock on my son. Other than that, I’m sure I behaved as normal, which he found highly objectionable. This is as close as you or I will ever come to receiving a badge of honor.’_ ”

“Now I see where you get it from,” BJ said.

“I didn’t think it was a mystery. Okay. ‘ _B. Mildred Potter likes me a lot. Since she is extremely happily married, I’ll take this to mean your Colonel over there must be doing an okay job.’_ ” Hawkeye threw a shrug BJ’s way. He read the next line to himself, and hesitated before starting out loud.

“ _‘III.’_ That’s a roman numeral three, by the way. _‘III. Peg Hunnicutt is very smart, and very special. It seems to me anyone would be lucky to have her, and she seems pretty thrilled with BJ. It stands to reason that that makes you pretty lucky to have him. In case,’_ ” Hawkeye cleared his throat, “ _‘in case that’s too mushy for you, just thank him from me that you do.’_ ” Hawkeye paused, but didn’t look up.

“‘ _Of course, it should go without saying that he’s tremendously lucky to have you. I might be biased, but I’m fairly confident that you’re the best person on Earth. Even if you’re not, I love you, Hawk. You all deserve so much better than this. If I see you again tomorrow, it’ll be too late._

_Love,_

_Dad’_ ”

Hawkeye’s hands shook slightly as he folded the letter. BJ wanted very badly to steady them in his own. He heard Hawkeye breath in through his nose and out through his mouth in deliberate, long breaths.

“God damn it,” Hawkeye said.

“What?” BJ asked quietly.

“I fucking miss him.”

“That house was crazy,” Erin tells him on the plane from Portland to Chicago where they’ll have a few hours in the airport. BJ is sleeping against the window while Hawkeye sits in the aisle so he can get up and frantically pace if he becomes overwhelmed by the fact of being trapped in a tiny metal tube in the sky.

“I know,” he says, thankful for the distraction.

“I can’t believe Christine has a _baby._ ” Erin all but mouths the last word. Hawkeye can’t believe it either. Erin continues in a hushed tone so as not to wake BJ. “A husband and a _baby_. I mean, I know my parents got married when they were about that young but they didn’t have me for like _ten years._ And sure, I guess that had something to do with the fact that my father was a deeply repressed homosexual but it’s still _crazy_. I can’t imagine being married! I can’t imagine having a baby at all.”

“That’s how I felt when I met your father.”

“That’s very romantic, Hawkeye.”

“I try,” he says with a small shrug. It’s only fitting, and morbidly beautiful, that a new life should come into the world just as his father’s is ending. He thinks of all the babies that were born the day his mother died. He wonder how many of them got drafted. He wonders how many of their babies got drafted into the next war.

They started going back to Maine the first summer after Hawkeye moved out west. Peg offered to stay in the house and look after Erin, but Erin insisted on going with them to meet Mr. Hawkeye’s Dad.

“That’s Dr. Hawkeye’s Dad to you,” Daniel said with a big grin when Erin introduced herself on his front porch, “but you can call me ‘Daniel.’”

“Okay, Daniel,” Erin said, and made her way to the big armchair in the living room. She perched on it sideways in much the same way Hawkeye had spent his childhood sprawling his tiny body across it. BJ rolled his eyes. He always sat in chairs quite normally thank you very much, so it was anybody’s guess where Erin had picked up this habit.

“Do you have stuff for dinner, Dad, or do you want me to go to the store?” Hawkeye asked from the kitchen where he’d immediately started poking around in the fridge.

“I was just gonna make something small tonight. We can all do a big shop tomorrow, take a nice walk around town.”

“Mm-hm,” Hawkeye agreed, and got himself a glass of water from the sink. Then he got for BJ and Erin, too.

“You gave Hawkeye a very silly name,” Erin said between big gulps of water. “He says it’s from a storybook. Last of the Mexicans.” BJ choked on his sip.

“Close enough,” Daniel said.

“Why did you choose it?”

“Well,” Daniel said, “It was the best character from my favorite book, and Hawkeye’s my favorite son.”

“He’s your only son,” Erin pointed out. Daniel shrugged.

“It suited him,” he said, looking over Erin to meet Hawkeye’s eyes. “It still does.”

“I wish I had a name from a book,” Erin huffed, and crossed her arms.

“Well, what’s your favorite book?” Daniel asked.

Erin didn’t even have to think about it. She carried it around with her most places and begged whatever adult was charged with her to read it to her every night.

“ _The Secret Garden_ by Frances Hodgson Burnett,” she recited. Daniel smiled.

“The main character is a little girl, right? What’s her name.”

“Mary Lennox.”

“Hm,” Daniel said, rubbing his chin in a grand show of contemplation. He looked over the back of the armchair at BJ for permission to go on. BJ smiled back.

“‘Mary’ is pretty boring, huh? No one will even know it’s a nickname. But how about if I call you ‘Lennox?’”

Erin beamed. “That sounds good.”

“Oh, kiddo,” Hawkeye said. “That’s you all over.”

Almost fifteen years later, he dies in the spring, so they simply take their trip early that year. Peg comes to collect them from the airport when they get home. She shares an apartment in town with Margaret now, the one that Margaret and Hawkeye started renting fifteen years ago, and they aren’t _together_ , though they fool around sometimes. Mostly they enjoy the independence they can have with the other for a roommate. 

When they arrive, Peg hugs Erin and Margaret hugs Hawkeye and BJ stands there with one of his hands each still on Erin and Hawkeye’s shoulders. Hawkeye, Margaret, and Erin squeeze into the back of Peg’s hatchback even though Hawkeye is really too tall for them to pull that off and it seems like his legs are everywhere. Peg drives them back to the house where she’s been staying to keep an eye on Wickett, Hawkeye’s aging cat. Arrow, full name Martin Arrowsmith, Wickett’s long time companion, died a few years back in a relatively dramatic fashion of some sort of feline epileptic seizure right there on the living room carpet. Erin expects it’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have scarred her for life if she hadn’t already been nineteen when she witnessed it.

“I picked up some stuff, for breakfast,” Peg says as they’re en route. “There’s fresh orange juice, and I got bagels and lox just for Hawkeye.”

“I haven’t had good lox since I was in college. That place in Hell’s Kitchen couldn’t slice it for shit.”

“Language, Hawk,” Erin mock-chides him. “I like the bagels from Noah’s.”

“You don’t know any better.”

“Would you guys take it easy?” BJ says from the passenger seat. “Hawk, we know you don’t like the bagels here, but you’re just gonna have to deal with it.”

Margaret rolls her eyes. Erin’s tall, too, so she’s jammed in the middle seat between the two of them. Hawkeye and BJ always fight about the stupidest things. Like if bagels from California are good, or how often it really is necessary to mow the lawn, or if it’s better to just renew your fucking library books instead of having to pay two dollars in fines every time you bring them back extremely late _even though_ it’s not a lot of money. She loves them both dearly, and she absolutely hates getting dragged into their petty bullshit.

Of course, whenever they fight about something stupid it’s because something else is going on that’s really bothering them, and usually it’s a whole other rat race to try and get to the heart of the problem because even after fifteen years of therapy Hawkeye still refuses to talk about anything serious without at least an hour of jocular preamble and BJ will simply pretend everything’s fine right up until it’s not. This time it’s not a puzzle. Hawkeye’s dad is dead. She promises to herself she will talk to him and help him cry it out in a way maybe BJ can’t before he hurts anybody’s feelings with his seeming callousness.

“Hawkeye,” Margaret says after he’s gotten himself a bagel and some coffee. “This jocularity is most unseemly.”

“What is it, Margaret?” he says flatly. She hopes the redness in his eyes simply reflects the nature of his flight home.

“I’m worried about you. I just want to talk. And to make sure you’re not going to do anything silly.”

“That’s too bad, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that wasn’t silly.”

“Hawkeye.”

“I know, I know. But I don’t– Yes, I’m upset, Margaret, but not in a way that’s making me murderous. Do you know how intensely I would have preferred normal grief over the death of an aging family member to literally anything we saw in Korea?”

“Hawkeye, he was your father. As much as I don’t want you to be spiraling, I also don’t want you to just shove everything down that you’re feeling. You’ve got to know by now that that doesn’t help.”

But Margaret also knows he’s partly right. He’s grieving, but he’s not taking his father’s death as a personal affront against goodness and justice the way he did the deaths of all the boys he couldn’t save. She also knows she’s going to talk to BJ to make a plan to help Hawkeye get some closure. Sometimes one goodbye just isn’t enough.

The second year, Peg came with them. The three of them should have been an odd unit, and should have made Erin feel odd, but they figured that as non-standard as Erin’s upbringing was going to be, if it was filled with love from all sides that it couldn’t be all that bad. If having one parent who loves you more than life itself was enough for you to turn out okay, and Hawkeye could tell you from experience that it was, then having two, or three, or four simply couldn’t hurt. And besides, Daniel had met Peg long before he’d met BJ, at the party.

Peg still has all the letters BJ wrote from Korea. Of course she does. They seemed to say _I love you_ and _I love Hawkeye_ in equal measure. That’s why she sized up the situation and decided to talk to Mr. Pierce, in the ballroom of the Hotel Pierre in New York City. She’d seen photos of Hawkeye, but she didn’t think they would have helped much. What did help was that he was a sixty-something-year-old man there on his own amusing himself by making wisecracks at Colonel Houlihan’s expense and approximating a Lindy with Colonel Potter’s wife.

“Dr. Pierce.” She approached him by the chips and dips where he was idly dipping carrots in hummus while Mrs. O’Reilly told anecdotes from the farm.

“Mrs. Hunnicutt,” he said, standing to greet her with a handshake. It sounded awkward. She didn’t always feel like _Mrs. Hunnicutt_.

“Peggy,” she said. “Please.” He smiled.

“Of course, Peggy. Daniel. I–” He must have been about to say _I’ve heard a lot about you_ , but of course that wasn’t true. “I’ve heard a lot about your husband. And a little about you.”

“All of it thoroughly rotten?” she said.

“To the core.”

“They’re not in the Marines.”

“Oh boy,” he said. “That’s very bad.” But he looked like he thought it was very good.

“Do you mind if we talk for a minute?” she asked, gesturing to the balcony.

“Of course,” he said, and led her outside on his arm. They leaned against the railing and gazed across the park to the West Side skyline. 

“Hawkeye seems… Gosh, do you call him ‘Hawkeye?’ I can’t imagine you do.”

Daniel laughed, surprised. “Sure I do. It was only ever supposed to be my nickname for him. I mean, it’s gotten a little out of control since then…” he shrugged. “It’s from _Last of the Mohicans._ I was crazy about that book when Hawk was born, we–” he cut himself off. “People must think it’s an army nickname.” Peg gave him a small nod. “That must make him crazy.”

“He seems…” but she still couldn’t find the words to describe him. “BJ writes me about him all the time. Every letter, every story. Something about a house on fire, but less morbid.”

“Peggy?” he said, tearing his gaze away from the skyscrapers to meet her eyes, “Can I tell you a story?”

“Yes,” she said, since maybe that would help. Maybe Hawkeye was indescribable without the use of metaphor. He was already a character in a storybook.

“Hannah and I– that’s Hawkeye’s mom,” he started. “Hannah and I got married on October 18th, 1917. That’s exactly a week before the Russians overthrew the czar,” he added as an aside. “When we got together we swore we were going to wait for the war to be over before we got married. But that was back when we thought the whole thing might be over in a couple of months. A year. So eventually we decided we were tired of waiting. We got married so we could buy the house, move out of my little apartment in town, you know. But Hawkeye’s birthday is August 21st, 1919, which I think you’ll find is a convenient nine months after Armistice Day.”

“No kidding,” Peg said, unable to contain a laugh.

“Afraid not,” he said, smiling, and shaking his head. “When Hannah got sick I couldn’t figure out how to tell him. I just acted like the whole thing was going to blow over on its own. But it never does, you know? A disease is just like a war. Even when it ends, it’s not a clean break.” He paused, and she followed his gaze to a pond in a clearing in the park. “When did you get married?”

“May 23rd, 1942,” Peg recited. “The same day as Jack Kirby and Roz Goldstein.”

“Charming,” Daniel said, and sighed. “Whatever happened to the war to end all wars, you know? Hawkeye asked me that once, I remember because I was driving him home from school. Wow, you kids got married pretty young–”

“Hawkeye’s not married,” Peggy said. It was phrased like it might have been a question but she knew the answer. She clutched onto the answer like a lifeline, actually.

“No,” Daniel confirmed. “There was someone, once, who might’ve– but on the other hand, it might’ve been doomed from the start,” he said, with less bitterness than you might expect.

“Anything could be doomed,” Peg said. “Anything that doesn’t work out.”

“That’s the thing, right? We really thought we were doing the right thing, having a kid when peace broke out.”

“We didn’t wait for peace. We barely knew there was a war. Now it’s all we know.”

“Jesus Christ,” Daniel said. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And Hawkeye’s thirty-two goddamn years old, you know? And when they took him? It still felt like they were taking my baby away.” He ran a hand through his hair, silvery and coarse. “How old’s your little girl? What’s she like?”

“Erin?” Peggy said, smiling out of reflex. “Fourteen months. And she’s perfect.”

Daniel smiled back. “Uh-huh.”

“Oh, I know that’s how everybody feels but I know she really is perfect.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said. He peered over the railing at the sidewalk below them. “That feeling doesn’t go away.”

“Actually,” she said, “that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“I figured it might be.”

Peg took a deep breath. She’d tried to rehearse this conversation in the mirror earlier but couldn’t even bring herself to say out loud the thought that had been racing through her head nearly since BJ’s first letter home.

“I think BJ is in love with Hawkeye.”

“Oh.”

“I think BJ is in love with Hawkeye,” Peg repeated, quietly, as if talking to herself. She’d convinced herself it would be okay to say since it really only implicated BJ. She’d also evaluated that Mr. Pierce would be cool enough not to try and phone him in, not when he knew how important BJ and Hawkeye were to each other.

“Peggy…” he said softly, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so– I’m so sorry.”

“That’s, um– That’s okay, actually. I don’t really blame him. Hawkeye sounds… fun.”

“He is fun.”

“Right.” Peggy felt lightheaded. She started to laugh, and Daniel joined in with her. 

“Why are we laughing?” he asked almost breathlessly.

“I don’t know.”

“Listen, Peggy, for your sake, I hope it isn’t true. But, um… I don’t know.” He drummed his fingers on the railing. “For his sake? I can’t help but hope that it is.”

Peg didn’t know why but she felt relieved. She thought BJ was in love with Hawkeye, and Daniel thought Hawkeye was in love with BJ. Maybe there was something to that.

Hawkeye loves to cook. BJ guesses he could have figured that out from the scathing way Hawk always talked about the food from the mess tent, but everybody talked about the food that way. Most people couldn’t make good on their word that they could come up with something better. Hawkeye could. It isn’t that he’s some kind of amazing chef or anything, he just loves to be in a kitchen. He likes having something to do with his hands, whether it’s surgery or knitting or darts or chess or giving extremely decent hand jobs, or cooking. He’s had enough practice that he can make plenty of things without a recipe, but he loves to wing it and experiment with new things, too. He’ll make almost anything if the New York Times cooking section says it serves a family of five. Naturally, the morning after they get back, he makes French toast.

“You know,” Hawkeye says as he whisks eggs in a bowl with vanilla until there’s a thin layer of foam on top, “I always act like this is my father’s recipe, but really it’s my mom’s, and really she got it from her bubbie who grew up making it in the ever ambiguous _old country_ that all Ashkenazi Jews seem to come from.”

“Uh-huh,” BJ says, grabbing a handful of just-washed blueberries.

“Hey, don’t eat all of those. I’m making a compote.”

“Oh, he’s making a compote.” But he doesn’t eat anymore blueberries. He’s heard the story. Of the elaborate breakfasts as a harbinger of doom. He tries not to read into it. Hawkeye makes French toast all the time.

“I still can’t believe you live in _California._ ” Daniel whispered the last word like it was a swear. “I thought it was nice, when you lived in New York. Your mom loved that horrible city. She loved all the different types of food you could get there. And that there was always something to do. Never anything to do here,” Daniel said as he finished drying the dishes. “We tried– I hope you had fun anyway.”

“I only ever had fun, Dad,” Hawkeye said from the kitchen table. BJ was upstairs saying goodnight to Erin. It had probably been about five years since they started coming.

“Trees to climb, fish to catch. I suppose it makes for a childhood.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up in the city. I did love living there, though. I loved this little Italian place in the village, a _trattoria_ , right? The kind of place that mob deals definitely went down. The kind of place with checkered tablecloths and fresh veal parmesan and an old lady called _Luciana_ behind the counter. And there was this Greek place, on 113th street? I used to go there all the time when I was in school, and the only thing I could afford was the pasta, this pasta dish. Just spaghetti, butter, and feta cheese but _kala, kala!_ One semester during finals I swear we went there every day for a week.

“Or there was this Ukranian place, on second avenue? There would be a line out the door for pastrami sandwiches from Katz’s and one for Veselka’s pierogi and they’d meet in the middle on East 4th. You’d make a day of it. And don’t even get me started on the Chinese food! Dim Sum in Chinatown! Beej says the Chinese food in San Francisco is better, and honestly plenty of it is, but c’mon. They’re not slouching in Chinatown either.”

Sometime while Hawkeye was waxing poetic, BJ appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and smiled at Daniel over Hawkeye’s shoulder.

“Don’t go knocking Angie’s,” BJ said as he came to join Hawkeye at the table.

“Tea, BJ?” Daniel offered.

“Sure, thanks. Erin’s reading under the covers, but she’ll be asleep soon. She hasn’t put down _The Phantom Tollbooth_ since she got it.”

“I’m not knocking Angie’s! I love Angie’s. Angie is precisely who I was thinking of when I said some of the food over there is as good as New York.”

“I think the nearest Chinese restaurant to here might _be_ in New York,” Daniel joked. He tended to the boiling kettle and returned with three mugs of tea. Hawkeye took his tea and coffee the same way, black, with two sugars. Making tea for Hawkeye was one of BJ’s favorite activities.

“I remember how angry it used to make you,” Daniel went on, “reading about all the horribly average guys who were getting these research grants for thousands of dollars to do all this work. How does it feel now that everybody’s reading about you?”

“It’s hardly everybody, Dad, it’s the _Crabapple Cove Courier_.”

“It’s everybody I know.”

“It’s thousands of dollars down the drain as far as I’m concerned,” BJ said. “If we’re not the first or the fastest to find something out, somebody else patents it, and we’re not allowed to work on it anymore. I really think they should take money clean out of medicine. Then we could all just pool our resources and work together. Then we’d make real advances.”

“Instead of having to wait for a war to roll around to do it for us,” Hawkeye added. Daniel shook his head somberly to himself.

“If I’d known what this world was gonna be like for you, Hawk…”

“It’s okay, Dad. I don’t mind. I’ve got BJ. I’ve got Erin. I don’t mind.”

“I want to go to the bookstore,” Erin tells Hawkeye and BJ after they finish their breakfast.

“Okay,” Hawkeye agrees. He wants to go, too. Erin drives them into town in BJ’s car. Hawkeye let his license lapse when he was living in New York and never bothered to get it renewed, even though it was near impossible to survive in the suburbs without a car. It’s okay, since he knows BJ thinks he’s a horrible driver and would prefer to just chauffeur him around anyway. 

“Looking for something in particular?” Hawkeye asks as she leads them into the shop.

“Yeah,” Erin answers. “I’ll meet you back here.”

Hawkeye lingers by the register until his favorite bookseller returns: Sal, a young woman with short blonde hair, usually seen wearing overalls, and with whom he’s formed an excellent rapport over the years.

“Hey, Hawk!” she greets him, “Long time no see! I’ve got something for you, actually, think you’re gonna like it.”

“Hm?” he says, distracted.

“You okay?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. We just got back from Maine. It’s– my father passed away actually.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. He was old, he got sick, et cetera. It’s not a big tragedy but, you know, he’s my dad.”

“Yeah, of course,” she says sympathetically, giving him a pat on the arm. “How’s BJ?”

“Oh, he’s all right. He’s been great. He– we took Erin back east to see him almost every year. BJ’s not very close with his parents, and Peg’s parents aren’t great fans of mine so, I don’t know. For a long time he never thought he was gonna have grandkids, you know? And he was square with that, you know, he didn’t blame me or anything. He didn’t mind. But it was pretty special to be able to bring Erin to see him. And she got to have a grandfather, too, that maybe she wouldn’t’ve otherwise.”

Hawkeye sighs. He’s not sure why he’s chosen now to bare his soul to her, but maybe it’ll help Sal hone her recommendations.

“You’re great parents, Hawkeye. Erin’s a great girl.”

“That much I believe,” Hawkeye says. Erin comes down the stairs with her books and holds them out to Hawkeye as she knows he’s buying. Hawkeye buys the book Sal was saving for him, too, _Breakfast of Champions_ , which she figured he’d like since he liked _Slaughterhouse-Five_ so much, on top of Erin’s two: an Ursula K. Le Guin novel he doesn’t recognize, and a James Fenimore Cooper one he recognizes all too well.

“You don’t have one of these already?” Sal jokes as she checks the inside cover for its pencilled in price.

“I gave mine to a friend,” Erin says with finality as she collects her wares. Hawkeye knows Erin’s copy. He gave it to her when he first came to visit BJ, before they had to say goodbye for the second (or make that one millionth) time. He loves her all the more for leaving it with his Dad. He hopes he had a chance to read the note inside.

“ _See Hawkeye, whenever_ ,” Hawkeye quotes himself. It was an instruction and an invocation he’d left with Erin nearly twenty years earlier, one she and her family had answered with flying colors.

“I wrote a note, too, saying that I did. I signed it from Lennox. I don’t know if he ever read it, but….I don’t know. I don’t think there’s ever a reason for what we do out of grief, you know?”

Yeah. Hawkeye knows.

One time was the first and only time BJ saw Hawkeye and Daniel fight. Erin was twelve or thirteen, the sort of age where Hawkeye joked about prepping for her Bat Mitzvah, and already upstairs with her nose in a book or her headphones plugged into the new record player. BJ was upstairs when it started but when he came down he knew something was up. It wasn’t loud, yelling, like he knew Hawkeye was capable of when something riled him. Instead it was quiet, and measured, like Daniel was the only person in the world capable of holding an important conversation with Hawkeye without excessive use of force.

“Would it kill you to seriously consider this, Ben? Would it kill you to take one thing seriously?”

Hawkeye had been offered a prestigious position at a university in the city, but was turning it down out of hand to stay in the lab with BJ. But when people fought with Hawkeye they were never fighting about what they were fighting about. Hawkeye was too evasive to let you confront him about what was really bothering you, and before you knew it some petty disagreement was blown way out of proportion and you didn’t talk for a while and then it all blew over. So BJ knew Hawkeye and Daniel were not really arguing about the job. 

“Why do you think I never take anything seriously, huh? You think I just became like this out of thin air? No, you raised me to be like this.”

“Not about things that matter.”

“Especially about things that matter! Besides, you don’t just get to pick and choose when your life lessons stick. I’m all or nothing.”

“You know better than that. It’s not as if I’m perfect, but I’ve learned from my mistakes. That’s the only thing we _can_ do, is try to be better than we were yesterday.”

“But you’re exactly like me! You can’t tell me I have a problem talking about important things, facing the truth, when the only reason I’m like this is because of you. God damn it, Dad, there’s breaking it to you gently and there’s just not breaking it to you at all!” 

Hawkeye stormed out of the kitchen and into the living room where he dramatically sat himself on the big armchair and crossed one leg over the other. He stared into the unlit fireplace with his arms crossed.

“Ben.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Hawkeye.”

“What?” he said, exasperated, and looked over. Daniel sighed.

“You and BJ are more than your work, you know. He’s not gonna drift away from you just because you’re not in the same office anymore.”

“What? That’s not what this is about.”

“Then what is it about, Hawk?” BJ startled them both by speaking up.

“Beej,” he said, standing abruptly. “How long have you been there?”

“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.”

“Tea, BJ?” Daniel offered.

“Sure, thanks.” BJ made for where Hawkeye was standing, traced a finger down his arm then took his hand in his. “Hawkeye–”

“We’ve never not worked together,” Hawkeye interrupted, speaking in a hushed tone. “I mean when we’ve been together, we’ve never not been working. Together. What if… What if that’s what this is?”

“Hawkeye, we are not _colleagues_. You– I mean– what? Hawk, we’re raising a daughter together.” It still baffled BJ how someone so utterly brilliant as Hawkeye could be so insecure.

“ _Your_ daughter.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I just–”

“I’m madly in love with you, remember? The whole time, remember? Rudyard Kipling?”

“I remember, I remember.” Words to live by. Marked words for Hawkeye. BJ took Hawkeye’s cheek in his hand. He still never shaved. It made him look smart, like a starving academic.

“Do you want to take the job?” BJ asked.

“I’m still thinking about it.”

“Well I think you should. You would look so fucking handsome in tweed.” BJ leaned in to kiss him but Hawkeye couldn’t because he was laughing too hard.

“I wouldn’t be a _professor_. I’m an M.D., not a Ph.D., remember?”

“I remember, I remember,” BJ said, combing his fingers through Hawkeye’s hair as the kettle boiled. Hawkeye took both their mugs went upstairs. BJ lingered for a moment.

“You’re good at talking him down,” Daniel said, in a way that said both _thank you_ and _why is being around you like walking on a cliff’s edge for my kid?_

“Years of practice,” BJ said. Those days when he talked Hawkeye down it was usually because he was the one who talked him up in the first place. Daniel clapped him on the shoulder. It looked like there were a million things he wanted to say.

“Goodnight, BJ,” was the one he chose.

“Goodnight.”

The office had long since been made up into a guest bedroom (complete with a queen sized bed; “So, perfect for us,” Hawkeye had joked), so Erin stayed in Hawkeye’s old room while Hawkeye and BJ took the old office. When BJ got upstairs, Hawkeye was in bed, sipping his tea and reading the back of a Bell Sounds record jacket.

“Mama said there’ll be days like this,” Hawkeye said. BJ climbed into bed with him, then climbed on top of him, straddling Hawkeye’s lap. Hawkeye looked up at him in a show of nonchalance. His black hair might have faded to gray but his blue eyes never would. Hawkeye placed the record and his mug on the nightstand. “Can I help you?” 

BJ took a deep breath, just thinking about where he was. “Nope,” he said. “I just love you is all.”

“Oh. Well, in that case.” Hawkeye reached up and gently pulled BJ’s face toward his. They must’ve kissed a thousand times since the war. More. BJ was even slightly ashamed of the fact that neither actually remembered their first kiss; a drunken Hawkeye on more than one occasion had propositioned BJ in Korea and he’d stupidly let him get away with it, not thinking about the fact that he might have been doing more harm than good. They kissed all the time now, of course, and doing it just how the other liked it had become second nature. Still, after all these years, there was a rush of electricity that ran down BJ’s spine each time Hawkeye’s lips met his, each time his fingertips touched his skin, reminding him that he was alive, and that actually, he wanted to be that way.

“You’re tea’s getting cold,” BJ taunted him.

“You know, you’re right. Why do we bother with all this sex nonsense when there’s hot tea to be drunk?”

“I guess it gives us something to do.”

They didn’t actually have sex- it creeped Hawkeye out to do it in his dad’s office- but they did kiss for a rather protracted period of time that really should have bothered Hawkeye just as much. BJ counted himself lucky that it didn’t. Afterwards, Hawkeye laid with his head in the crook of BJ’s shoulder, running his fingers up and down his chest. BJ was acutely aware that if this were ten years ago, he would have been playing with his dog tags.

“I’ve never seen you and your dad argue before,” BJ said.

“That’s ‘cause we don’t, not really. I’m not non-confrontational by nature–”

“You don’t say.”

“But I am with him. Except when I’m not, you know?”

“Go on.”

“Well, it’s like–” Hawkeye propped himself up, “It’s like… We had this big fight after Carlye left me. I called him to, I don’t know, talk about it? Which is already odd, right, because I’m not totally un-self-aware, like, I know I don’t talk about my feelings ever.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh. But I was telling him how it felt like I had the rug totally pulled out from under me, you know? Like I was totally blindsided, because I thought things had been going so well. And I told him it was making me crazy because the only other time I’d ever felt like that was when Mom died, because he told me she was fine right up until she was dead, basically.”

“Sheesh,” BJ said. He knew the story, of course, but it was still rough. He also couldn’t imagine if he would have handled it any better.

“I don’t really remember what happened. I think he got mad that I was comparing Mom to Carlye, or blaming him for not being able to handle it? When I think back on it, you know, he probably felt guilty, like if he’d been more direct with me when I was a kid then maybe I wouldn’t have been so heartbroken over Carlye. And maybe he’s right about that. Your childhood can really fuck you up, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. I mean, I guess so. I know.”

“We’re too similar to fight a lot. But when we do fight it’s especially hard because it’s like arguing with myself. Like I always knows what he’s gonna say before he says it and it makes me even angrier than I didn’t think of a way to preempt it first, even though that’s crazy. Besides. For so long we were all we had. I don’t know, Beej. I don’t know.”

BJ leaned down and kissed Hawkeye’s temple. “It’s hard work.”

Hawkeye leaned in to BJ’s embrace. “You’re such a good father. You always have been. I always… God, it’s silly to say this.”

“Then you must.”

“I used to imagine raising kids with you.” Hawkeye was blushing. Actually blushing!

“Oh, yeah?” BJ prompted.

“Shut up! You know I always imagined a life for us together. Even when I was telling myself I wasn’t. I always wanted kids. A kid. Even though I didn’t want to get married. I thought I was just gonna have to get square with that, with never being a dad, or being unhappily married.”

“Well, then aren’t you a lucky son of a bitch?” BJ grinned.

“That’s one way to put it, yeah.” Hawkeye leaned up to kiss him again.

“Put it another way?”

“I love you,” Hawkeye said. “I’ll never be able to shake you.”

When they go to protests, Erin wears the top from BJ’s old fatigues, the one he didn’t cut the sleeves off of. She has a caduceus pinned to both sides of the collar, one of BJ’s and one of Hawkeye’s. When Hawkeye heard on the radio they were sending troops to Vietnam, he broke a mug. Not out of anger; he simply went slack and dropped it, and got scalding hot coffee all over his feet. Erin likes telling people about how Hawkeye used to stir shit up and rile all the military types that came through their unit. Hawkeye doesn’t mind. He’s glad it’s finally come to some use. He was tired of never having made a difference to anyone.

There was the time Aunt Eloise and her side of the family visited, and Hawkeye and BJ tortured her by turning up the volume on their picture of domestic wedded bliss, telling jokes in bad taste and letting gazes and touches linger longer than necessary. There was the time Radar visited and asked if it got confusing with both Hawkeye and his dad being called Dr. Pierce. There was the time Margaret tagged along and kept the whole house laughing all night with tales of the things her father had said about everyone at the reunion, especially his particularly colorful commentary about Daniel and Peggy. There was the time Hawkeye’s nutty Aunt Sarah came up from New York (which she left about as frequently as Daniel left Maine) and shared wonderful stories of growing up with Hannah and their parents on the Lower East Side.

Sometimes it made BJ wonder what Hawkeye was doing with him out in California, if he was obviously so loved back here. He tried to show him he was just as loved on the west coast as the east, but he knew Hawkeye was harder to convince than most of something like that. One time, when Erin hadn’t come with them because she was visiting Paris and traveling around Europe with her school friends, Hawkeye and BJ talked across the airplane aisle.

“It’s so nice that Erin gets to travel,” BJ said wistfully, looking past Hawkeye out the window behind him.

“Yeah, it is. I’ve only ever been out of the country twice, and neither was on purpose. Once, I accidentally drove to Canada after I took a wrong turn in the dark on the way home from school. You’ll be familiar with the second time.”

“Intimately.” 

“Sometimes California feels like a foreign country,” Hawkeye said.

“Do you feel like you don’t fit in?”

Hawkeye thought about it, drumming his fingers on his thigh. His warm brown corduroy slacks decidedly said New England, even though Hawkeye’s laissez-faire attitude to convention typically said otherwise.

“I don’t really feel like I fit in anywhere.”

It was equal parts true and untrue. Hawkeye was loved everywhere he went because he was impossible not to love. But he was impossible not to love because he was so unique. Hawkeye was always unlike anyone you’d ever met before, and he drew you toward him like a magnet right up until he stopped, and you drifted safely into orbit. Hawkeye was less like a sun, since he wasn’t blinding to look at or dangerous to get near, and more like Saturn, with rings in concentric circles around him of people who cared, who made him who he was, and would’ve gotten nearer if they could’ve but forward momentum overtook gravity and so he felt alone instead of surrounded by people that loved him which, of course, he was.

“I love not fitting in anywhere with you.”

They go out to a club in San Francisco, having an oldies night and singing songs Hawkeye remembers from Korea which, as all things, is crazy-making. The girl singing up front sounds just like Blossom Dearie.

“ _Copper comes from Arizona, peaches come from Georgia–_ “

“Hawkeye!” BJ, Peg, and Erin all scream over the singer as Hawkeye blushes.

“– _Come from Maine…”_ Hawkeye remembers when Peg learned to play that song on her banjo, a gift sent over from Mildred Potter upon her and BJ’s auspicious thirteenth wedding anniversary. They usually sub ‘doctors’ for ‘lobsters,’ but ‘Hawkeye’ does just as well when they’re trying especially hard to embarrass him. Everybody turns to look at their table but with Peg there as well they don’t have too much reason to stare.

Hawkeye does see someone’s gaze lingering, and he follows his eye line next to him to BJ. Somebody in the bar is checking out BJ!

“Beej!” Hawkeye says in an excited whisper. “Don’t look now, but there’s a guy behind you, uhh, your seven o’clock, who’s definitely trying to give you the eye.”

BJ smirks. “Too bad he hasn’t got a chance with me. I’m already spoken for. And as you know fidelity is very important to me.”

Hawkeye raises his eyebrows. “Either way he’s got you pegged.”

“He’s got me what?” 

“Come on,” Hawkeye says, “dance with me.”

Hawkeye is a bad dancer, but he makes up for it with confidence and goofy steps. And he loves being in a place where he can show off BJ, and show off that BJ is his. He doesn’t mean to rub it in that guy’s face to be cruel; if anything, he’ll show him he was right to be picking up on whatever signals BJ is sending out. But he does think BJ is the most amazing person on the planet, so why shouldn’t he show off that BJ loves him back. Because BJ loves him back, and that’s all the matters.

“ _Pencils come from Pennsylvania, vests from Vest-Virginia, tents from Tent-a-see!_ ” Hawkeye sings along as BJ spins him. “I think this song was written just for you.”

“I’m from _California_ ,” BJ says, drawing out each syllable like Hawkeye doesn’t know.

“Uh-huh. _But you, you come from Rhode Island, and little old Rhode Island_ _is famous for you!_ ” Hawkeye finishes with a flourish. “Maybe it’s for both of us,” he says, and he smiles as BJ pulls him close when the music slows. “Crabapple Cove may as well be in Rhode Island.”

“Mm-hm,” BJ says, his nose in Hawkeye’s hair.

“They have the best farmers’ market in the world in Providence. They had these plum preserves that were absolutely to die for. I feel like I’ve been searching my whole life to get them again.” 

“Hawkeye, you are just like plum preserves to me.”

BJ and Hawkeye have never really been on a date. They’ve been dancing, and sight-seeing, and sailing, and fishing, cooked romantic candlelit dinners, kissed on the Wonder Wheel, and lived together for the past twenty years with a daughter and two elderly cats but they never called it “dating.” Just like they never really tell people they’re “married.” Saying you’re a bachelor with a live-in other bachelor tends to get the message across a little more precisely, anyhow. Odder and more indefinable still is that their first date, if they ever had one, did not happen while they were not-dating.

“Why does it need to be a double _date_?” BJ said, yanking on the horrible brown shoes that closed out his horrible Class-A uniform.

“ _Because_ ,” Hawkeye said lyrically, performing a little cursory spin around the Swamp for BJ as he spun his hat in the air. “We are going to be spending the evening in Tokyo with two of the most beautiful ladies in this unit and we are going to pretend for one night that the whole world isn’t crumbling around us and before our very eyes.” Hawkeye dramatically swooned down onto his cot and posed sideways toward BJ, propping his head up on one arm and batting his eyelashes.

“My _date_ ,” BJ nearly spat the word again, “is Margaret.”

“What’s the big deal, Beej? Just show her a little kindness for the night is all. It’s not like she expects you to put out.”

“Hawkeye!”

“What, what?” he said in mock-defensiveness as their jeep honked outside. “Our chariot awaits!” Hawkeye said excitedly.

“Oh, good,” BJ said under his breath.

“Hello, my dear,” Hawkeye said to Nurse Anderson as she rounded the corner and held out her hand, which he kissed, vehemently, then started kissing his way up her arm until she giggled and swatted him away.

“Stop eating my arm, Hawkeye, or it won’t be there when you need me to assist you later.”

“I hope you don’t mean in surgery.”

Meanwhile Margaret was approaching them as well, dusting off her skirt.

“Thanks for inviting me along, BJ,” she said. “It’ll be nice to get off camp for a while. And I almost don’t mind a man taking me for a candlelit dinner so long as it’s you. You I trust!”

“Well, I trust you, too, Margaret.”

“Okay, gang!” Hawkeye said, opening passenger side door to their car.

“Sorry ladies!” A voice rang over the PA. “Surprise inspection in the compound! Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Chester requires your presence on the double!”

“Surprise inspection!?” Margaret all but shrieked.

“Ugh, Major,” Anderson whined, “we were practically off-camp!”

“‘Practically’ being the operative word, Lieutenant. Come on, let’s get to the hospital. Pierce, Hunnicutt, guess you’re just going to have to go stag tonight.” Margaret sped off with her nurse before Hawkeye had time to protest.

“Damn it!” Hawkeye said, and looked like he was going to kick the side of the car before realizing it might not be as resilient as a jeep. “We had a reservation and everything,” he said, sounding genuinely downhearted. “I never make reservations.”

“No reason it has to go to waste,” BJ said, the perpetual optimist. Realist, he figured. Hawkeye’s face lit up at the prospect. He tried to make it look like that was only in anticipation of the food, and not the company or the atmosphere, and certainly not the food and the company and the atmosphere together.

“Right!” Hawkeye said. “We’ll just have to go on the date ourselves.”

Being on a date but not a date with BJ was equal parts excruciating and exhilarating. BJ was the perfect gentleman, making a big show of pulling out the chair for Hawkeye and pouring him water first, even offering to pay the bill before he realized he didn’t have enough cash to cover them both, as he’d been counting on Margaret going Dutch with him. Hawkeye couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a real date. He didn’t particularly like taking girls out on them since he abhorred tradition, except when he was on the receiving end of it from BJ Hunnicutt. Apparently. They took a stroll down the Ginza and stopped in an English language bookshop that Hawkeye had peered into before but never made it inside.

“Hey, here you are!” BJ said, pulling a book with a black cover and gold accent on the spine. He leafed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “The young man broke out of the ambush and sprang forward to join the two principal actors in the scene!” He read dramatically. “The merriment of Hawkeye was not easily appeased.”

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye said, taking the book out of BJ’s hands, not missing the feeling of BJ’s knuckles under his fingertips as he handled its elaborate binding. He fanned through it himself. He’d never seen these illustrations before. They were even more beautiful than the ones in the anniversary edition copy he’d gotten from Carlye, although maybe that was relatively speaking.

“I’d say they should write stories about you, but they already have,” BJ said, tapping the book in Hawkeye’s hand. He nearly dropped it, his grip having gone limp while BJ spoke.

“Uh-huh,” he managed to say again.

“Uh-huh,” BJ repeated. “I mean it, Hawk,” he said, returning to browsing the shelves. “You’re really quite the character.”

“So I’ve been told.” _They wrote a book about me_ , Hawkeye thought. _They wrote an epic about you, Odysseus._ As much as it tore him apart, Hawkeye had made it his mission to get BJ home to his Penelope. Hawkeye bought the book. He couldn’t not buy the book. BJ bought a Grimm’s _Fairytales_ that he bitterly remarked Erin would be old enough to enjoy by the time he got home. Hawkeye squeezed his shoulder and reassured him that it wouldn’t be as long as that. They’d be home for Christmas, after all. _You can count on me_.

BJ sees new things every day that remind him why he is in love with Hawkeye. The way he sings and dances along to the radio when he does the dishes. The way he still laughs like a young man, with his whole body and vital capacity, the way the whole house will know if he finds something funny and rush in to find out what it is. The way he treats Erin like a fully fledged human person, the way he always has, even when she was a toddler. The way he works at being kind and funny because to him they are not merely incidental facets of his personality but important things for being a well-rounded person; they are the reasons he is able to love himself. BJ surprises him and hugs him from behind while he’s peeling carrots.

“What’s up, doc?” BJ says, kissing him on the cheek and spinning him towards him.

“Carrot cake,” Hawkeye says, a carrot in one hand and the peeler in the other. “Dad loved it, with cream cheese icing. It’s underwhelming as desserts go but–”

“It’s perfect. Peg loves cream cheese icing,” BJ says, grabbing a carrot from Hawkeye’s pile and taking a big bite. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, I’ve got plenty.” He goes back to chopping. “What time is it tonight, six or seven?”

“I left it loose. Erin has work until six, she’s coming over right after. I’ll bet you ten bucks Margaret and Peg come together, at six-thirty exactly.”

“That’s pretty good odds. I bet Margaret will get here then. Peg I say… seven. Seven-oh-four.”

Peg gets there at six-thirty, Margaret at seven-fifteen.

“I was going to be here forty-five minutes ago!” Margaret shrilly whispers to BJ when he lets her in. “But then one of my nurses said–”

“Relax, Margaret, it’s fine. Sal and Josefina aren’t even here yet, what with the city traffic. Hawk’s in the kitchen if you want to say hi.” 

BJ returns to his spot on the living room sofa. Erin is beside him, and Peg in the chair opposite. BJ’s coworkers from the lab are mingling with Hawkeye’s teacher friends by the makeshift bar, and Shelly Havers, the eccentric widow from next door was last seen regaling Hawk with tales of her youth in the U.S.O., so there they are, the three of them. The Hunnicutts, as it were. It’s not lost on Peg or Erin either what a pretty picture they make, the picture of the alternate world where this is still his and Peggy’s house, where the three of them live in blissful ignorance of the force of nature that would be ravaging the Mid-Atlantic if they’d left him there. But of course, there’s no world at all where they left him there. Hawkeye always got here, got home, eventually.

“Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you,” Erin interrupts the tranquility with delivery she didn’t learn from either of her parents. “I’m going to go see if Hawkeye needs any help.”

“Okay, honey,” BJ says, watching fondly as she goes. Peg looks at him for a moment and they both try to read the other’s expression.

“She’s probably gay.”

“She’s definitely gay.”

Peg laughs out loud in a cool, crisp tone. “Nature, nurture,” she says. “It’s all the same, I suppose.”

Sal and Josefina get there after twenty more minutes. It’s almost summer, and the days are getting longer, so even though it’s nearly eight o’clock it’s hardly dark.

Hawkeye’s wearing a t-shirt and an apron when he finally emerges from the kitchen, and the red stains from his homemade salsa alarm Margaret so much that she clutches at BJ’s arm for reassurance that they aren’t actually looking at the figure of a man who just traveled twenty years in time. Hawkeye sees her startled face and quickly doffs the apron, and runs a hand through his hair to smooth it into place. (BJ would say another reason he loves Hawkeye is that he still has so much hair, but he’s not as shallow as all that.)

People have been eating his noshes all night, and he’s just finished setting out his so-called Leaning Tower of Pancakes, having opted to make breakfast for dinner. He urges everybody to dig in and BJ goes to him while people fix their plates.

“Only breakfast in the morning is a harbinger of doom,” Hawkeye says, anticipating BJ’s question. “This is in his honor, since I figure I have to finally forgive him.”

“You don’t have to do anything, Hawk,” BJ said, tucking an errant gray lock behind his ear.

“I do forgive him, though,” Hawkeye says, looking up at BJ with eyes so blue BJ wants to make swatches from them and show the sky what it could be doing better.

“Then I’m happy for you.”

Hawkeye smiles, and leans up to kiss BJ once before he pulls away. BJ doesn’t know if Hawkeye slouches to make himself seem small or if it’s simply because Hawkeye is a person who slouches. Either way, he loves that he has to come up to his full height to kiss him. Imagine that, being the only person on earth who can make Hawkeye Pierce stand up straight.

“Okay,” he says, “I’m gonna say a few words.”

“Wait,” BJ says, “let me go first. You just let this be a party for a second.”

Hawkeye nods as BJ goes to the front of the room.

“I would call the first time I ever talked to Daniel Pierce… inauspicious,” BJ begins. People who know the story smile bittersweetly. “The army, in its infinite wisdom, had declared Hawkeye dead, and, ever the efficient operation, had notified his next of kin posthaste. So Daniel called the base and asked for me, and said he would only talk to me. And the line went dead after he said two words to me, and after we figured out what happened, those five seconds on the phone with him just repeated in my head until we knew we’d sorted it out.

“Now, I’m a sucker for a good party. I… I hadn’t known Hawkeye very long at this point, but I knew he was something special. I knew it was important to keep him safe, and to keep him afloat, if I couldn’t keep him happy. So, in the face of knowing that nothing could make things right besides the army actually fixing their mistake, I threw Hawk a wake. And maybe it was in bad taste, but even in the few weeks I’d known him I’d learned Hawkeye loves nothing more than a joke in bad taste.” Hawkeye was looking up at him making the expression he’d pretended so many times that he hadn’t seen. The expression that watched him tell the story of Androcles and the Lion, or of Erin and the Bubbles on her Hand, and of the Late Captain Pierce, now, too.

“So that’s why we’re here tonight. Because I don’t know what to do besides have a party. At least this time we don’t all have to have red hair,” BJ says to Hawkeye and Margaret only, though of course everyone else is still there.

“So here’s to Dr. Pierce, and here’s to Dr. Pierce,” BJ says, raising his glass skyward, then pointing it toward Hawkeye. “I’ll never be able to shake you.”

Hawkeye’s eyes are glistening, but he’s smiling, of course he’s smiling. “ _Thank you_ ,” he mouths toward BJ, and goes to take the stage himself, but Erin beats him to it.

“I just wanna say a few words before we turn it over to the man of the hour,” Erin says, taking BJ’s place.

“Everybody knows that Hawkeye’s dad called him Hawkeye,” she starts. She gets a small titter of laughter, and gives a small smile in return.”What I mean is, everybody knows he gave him that nickname out of a story, out of a book that, let’s be honest, is actually pretty boring if you try to get through it.” Another round of laughter, from Hawkeye, too, even as he’s wiping at his eyes.

“When I was a little kid,” she goes on, “there were four people I wanted to be just like. My dad, who gave me a horrible sense of humor and big feet, my mom, who gave me nerves of steel and perfect hair, my Auntie Margaret, who taught me never to take any shit from anybody, and Hawkeye. Hawkeye who–” she starts getting choked up. “Hawkeye who laughs in the face of danger, and knows that nothing is too sacred or important to make fun of. Hawkeye who saved my dad’s life every day and didn’t even know he was doing it. I, um, I wanted to be just like him.”

“So when I was a kid and Daniel gave me a nickname out of a book, too, I felt like I was halfway there. It, um, it really made me start to see Hawk more like a father and not just as my dad’s, you know, sort of indescribable _roommate_ ,” she says to more laughs. “I learned pretty young that family can be complicated, but that complicated is okay. Some of my best friends are complicated.” She sniffles. She has the room in the palm of her hand. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I think there’s not enough people in this world who care deeply and love unconditionally. But, um, I’m going to give the floor over now to the guy we all know wins first prize at both.”

Hawkeye hugs her and kisses the top of her head as they trade places.

“I, uh… I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here today,” Hawkeye says. He’s greeted with teary eyed smiles and reluctant laughter, which he’ll have to take for what it is.

“The first thing my dad ever did to me was tell me a joke,” he starts in earnest. “That is, he named me Benjamin Franklin Pierce, which is just about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. It didn’t stick, though, and before I knew it he’d given me a new name to make up for it and, um, I guess it’s all been downhill since then.

“Dad wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t good at confronting hard truths, or being honest about his feelings. Remind you of anyone? But… he really tried his fucking best and I think he did okay in the long run. It’s not as if I was easy to deal with. It’s not as if any part of my life has ever been easy on him.

“We never fought much, in these last years of his life. We never had much to fight about. But when I was a kid he used to tell me I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on. He used to tell me I was reckless, not just with my body, but with my mind. And he tried to get it through to me that when I got hurt it wasn’t just myself that was hurting, but also everyone around me. It’s taken me a long time to really understand that, because it means understanding how deeply other people care for you.

“I, uh… I’ve kind of gone through my whole life getting told that nobody cares about things as deeply as I do. I got used to having to deal with that. But even though maybe I do get first prize,” he gestures with his glass toward Erin, “I’ve got plenty of people who care about me now, and it feels so crazy not to have to worry that they’re going to leave. It’s, um, it’s been hard convincing myself that it’s okay to let go of that anxiety that one day I’m gonna have the rug pulled out from under me and all this will be gone in a second. But I don’t really worry about that anymore.” He lets out an exhale, and his shoulders relax. “I don’t really worry about that anymore,” he repeats, quieter, as if only to himself.

“So basically, let me finish by saying that I’m trying to take my father’s lessons to heart these days, since I know how scary it can be for everyone around you when you’re in pain and you let it get bad. You might even die one day, and that’s scary, too. But for now, we can live. We can live with love, and peace, and complicated family, and stories to help us understand the world. This is just to say thanks, and to say goodbye to my dad. He told jokes, and he told stories, and he saved lives, and I think maybe those are all the same thing.”

Hawkeye stands there for a moment more, and nods, and takes a sip, and everyone follows suit. BJ goes up to him after, once everyone’s returned to the table and started on Hawkeye’s carrot cake, and pulls him into a hug so deep that for a split second Hawkeye worries BJ is about to be torn from his grasp again, until he remembers that that will never happen.

“I think I should get that on my gravestone,” Hawkeye says, as BJ wipes the tears from his cheeks.

“What?”

“He told jokes, and he told stories, and he saved lives.”

**Author's Note:**

> the secret garden was my absolute favorite book when I was a child, so naturally I’ve decided it was Erin’s favorite as well
> 
> All the restaurants hawkeye talks about are real; I think the Italian place I’m thinking of is Trattoria Toscana on carmine street? I tried to find it on google maps but I think maybe it went out of business. rip. that greek place w the incredible feta pasta on 113th is Symposium, the Ukranian place, Veselka, is on second ave just uptown from Katz’s (the real world counterpart to Sol and Sol’s) and wasn’t established until 1954 (wtf!! So close!!) but in it goes bc the pierogi are to die for, and there are plenty of excellent dim sum places in chinatown. Love to eat at one again someday. Angie’s is made up tho, though I am picturing this hole-in-the-wall Chinese place I ate at in san Fransisco like ten years ago when I imagine it 
> 
> The story of the French toast is based on these cookies that my great-grandma (Bubbie Emma, a 6 ft tall 300 pound woman from Poland with 12 children and a penchant for eating entire pies in one sitting) makes that my mom and her siblings are in everlasting pursuit of being able to replicate
> 
> I scoured the wiki for as long as I could stand it before making up Hawkeye’s birthday according to my specifications bc I think it’s precisely in character for him to be an armistice-baby. Also looked up the hotel Pierre and apparently it’s real and on east 61st facing the park, so there ya go. I don’t really believe in the upper east side so I didn’t know. Unfortunately I looked up the fake date I gave for hawkeye’s parents’ wedding and it’s a thursday lmao but I couldn’t resist making it exactly a week before the Russian revolution just because
> 
> Is it just me or is it funny to set a mash fic during a time period when mash was on the air? It’s like, you can’t reference one of the main american cultural phenomena from the time. Huh. Anyway! @crickelwood on Tumblr if u want to say hi!


End file.
